Safety Properties in Distributed Systems
This opening day of phase-4 establishes the core safety guarantees (consistency, availability, partition tolerance) that every production AI system must reason about before adding fault tolerance or consensus layers. It directly informs later implementation choices in rate-limiting, API reliability, and multi-region serving patterns already present in the learner's codebase.
Resources
- 25 min
- 15 min
Deliverable
Journal entry posted to app/maku/page.tsx that lists three safety invariants relevant to the current rate-limiter and brief-form API routes
Quiz · 3 questions
1. Which guarantee must be sacrificed first when a network partition occurs between two replicas?
2. Name one concrete failure mode the current rate-limiter.ts implementation could exhibit under a network partition.
3. Describe how the Tail at Scale paper's latency observations would affect an AI inference endpoint that calls the brief-form API.